Topic “MIT Enterprise Forum”

The NFC Forum has published its first specification directed at NFC-enabled personal health care devices, hoping to expand use of NFC technology in the industry segment and reduce the reliance on proprietary implementations.

Such nonpayment applications as marketing campaigns and loyalty programs are more likely to drive adoption of NFC than payments, panelists told attendees of a recent “NFC Goes Social” event in Boston, organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum's NFC Cluster.

HEADLINE NEWS

NFC Times Exclusive – Deutsche Telekom has appointed a new head of payments and plans to support host-card emulation among other technologies as it seeks to revamp its struggling NFC mobile wallet, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive – Sequent Software, a supplier of mobile wallets, TSM and host-card emulation products, has appointed an interim CEO, replacing Robb Duffield, who stepped down earlier this month after having served as CEO for the Silicon Valley-based vendor for just under three years.

NFC Times Exclusive – Mobile operators are considering shopping for technology to launch a common platform to request tokenized payment cards from such providers as MasterCard Worldwide and Visa and to load the tokens onto their NFC SIM cards, NFC Times has learned.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Visa maintains that its offer to waive tokenization fees for the long term is designed to simplify the connections between thousands of card issuers and such wallet providers as Google and, perhaps later, Apple, thus driving widespread rollouts of mobile-payments services.

NFC Times Exclusive – Vodafone Group’s proxy-card NFC mobile-payments offer, which is designed to enable subscribers to add their credit and debit cards to their Vodafone Wallets as funding accounts linked to a Vodafone prepaid card stored on the SIM, has yet to be launched by any major Vodafone branch operator in Europe.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – The head of the Canadian telco joint venture Suretap Wallet told NFC Times that this week’s launch of the telco’s new wallet service was not prompted by the expected expansion of Apple Pay into Canada later this year.

NFC Times Exclusive – Major point-of sale-terminal vendors say that their most recently deployed terminals and perhaps others will be ready to accept loyalty cards from Apple’s Wallet when the nonpayment application launches with iOS 9 this fall.

UPDATED: NFC Times Exclusive –Australian credit union CUA has seen a 16% increase in value of transactions for mobile payments since the launch of its host-card emulation mobile-payments app last summer, though user numbers have remained small 11 months after one of the first HCE commercial launches globally.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Suppliers of cashless payment for vending machines predict the rollout of Apple Pay, along with planned introduction of Android Pay, will continue to reduce the use of cash at U.S. vending machines and will also lead to higher transaction amounts, though did not release actual figures.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Taiwan’s banking joint venture, Taiwan Mobile Payment Co., has disclosed that it will issue a request for tenders for a host-card emulation and tokenization platform, with plans calling for the technology to be made available to Taiwanese banks for mobile-payments launches by the end of the year.

NFC Times Exclusive – Both Apple and Transport for London are trumpeting the coming use of Apple Pay to pay fares on various modes of mass transit in London, including the fast-paced London Underground. But they face a couple of problems.

NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple today announced major new updates to Apple Pay, including the addition of store credit, debit and loyalty cards in the U.S., expansion of the mobile-payments service to its first overseas market, the UK, and a renaming of the wallet app itself from Passbook to Wallet.